How To Cook On A Backpacking Stove
The Sequel
At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since. — Salvador Dali
Any cook should be able to run the country. — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Cooking. Here’s the skinny on cooking as I see it. There are seven kinds of cooking: frying, boiling, baking, simmering, warming, steaming, and bag cooking. I’m going to skip all but the last two.
“Why?” you might say, revealing all your ignorance at one stroke. You poor, wretched mortal. Hah-ha. Now I get to pontificate.
As a lightweight or ultralight hiker, you don’t need the other cooking methods. If you want to bake or fry, you need a big stove and lots of fuel, not to mention a frying pan or oven of some kind. You wouldn’t be traveling light. You really don’t even need to simmer or warm food. If it’s cooked, you can eat it, and you can cook it by just adding hot water to it, given the right choice of foods.
If you’re out to hike, and serious enough about traveling light, then you’ll be hungry and won’t have time to cook up fancy soups or stews, or hang around all day rewarming food.
Boiling is a less efficient form of steaming. Steaming is a little on the fancy side, but can be useful for some things, and can stand in for baking or frying as well.
Let’s look at two kinds of cooking: bag-hydrating and bag-steaming. Both of these can be done using a ziplock bag. Bag-hydrating means adding hot water to instant food in a bag, then eating it. Bag-steaming means adding cold water to food in a bag and then steaming the whole bag with the food inside.
Both of these keep you and your equipment clean, and they’re simple. Bag-hydrating is quicker and less fussy, but bag-steaming is a close second, and can extend your trail-cooking repertoire with hardly any extra effort.
If you really, really have to get fancy, try muffins first. Cut the bottoms off a few 5.5 ounce aluminum juice cans. Get some paper baking cups for muffins, the kind that go into muffin tins. After mixing your batter, put one of those baking cups into the bottom of each can (your “muffin tins”), and then put the batter into the paper cups.
You can just barely squeeze three of these “muffin tins” inside a Wal-Mart Grease Pot, which is about 5.5 inches (140mm) in diameter. You can make a small rack from some hardware cloth to keep all this off the bottom of the pot. Put a bit of water into the pot and steam your muffins. This will bake some really moist muffins. You WILL be surprised. The inside of the pot won’t have anything dried and cooked on, but will still need to be rinsed or washed.
Bag Steaming
Bag-steaming works about the same way. You want to have some kind of rack inside the pot to keep the plastic bag off the pot’s bottom, or it will melt. And try to keep the bag away from the pot’s sides as much as possible, for the same reason.
Sometimes I do wonder a little tiny bit about how cooking inside plastic bags reacts with a person’s inner tube over the long term. It seems like just about everyone is cooking this way, at least part of the time, and the bags are made from polyethylene, which is pretty innocuous as things go, so maybe it’s as safe as anything else. But I might try using aluminum foil pouches for steaming.
You could carry a weightless plastic bowl to mix ingredients in, then dump them into a pouch or small “pan” that you shaped on the spot. You could also take pre-folded pouches of aluminum foil along, and then just unfold them, and mix ingredients with water in one of these pouches before steaming in it. Wouldn’t work for the bag hydrating process though. That would just leak.
But for steaming, maybe. Fold up the soiled foil when done and stuff it in with the rest of the garbage, which is mostly plastic bags. This might even weigh a bit less than a quart ziplock bag.
So, back to the details for the bag process.
Add water to the dry ingredients inside a quart-sized freezer-weight ziplock bag. Mix it all together by massaging the mixture through the sides of the bag. Squeeze ALL the excess air out of the bag, seal it, and place it on its side inside the pot. Light the stove and let it rip. This method will work for cornmeal variations, or multi-grain cereal, or oatmeal or minute rice, and anything else that cooks quickly but isn’t firmly in the “instant” category.
I’ve used it for a relatively hearty meal of mixed grains (nine tablespoons total: equal parts 7-grain cereal, corn meal, and falafel mix, along with several tablespoons each of powdered milk and Parmesan cheese and cooks on 0.75 ounce/22ml of alcohol).
Be sure to have enough water in the pot but no more than you need. If all of the water boils away, you’ll have semi-cooked food mixed with melted plastic, all stuck to the inside of your pot. If you have too much water, you’ll waste fuel bringing the water up to boiling temperature, even before steaming can start.
Steaming is more efficient than boiling for a couple of reasons.
First, steam cooks food faster. It takes a lot of heat to convert water into steam (a whole lot). This sounds bad, but it means that steam at boiling temperature carries more actual energy than liquid water at the same temperature. When this steam condenses on your food, it releases all that heat (heat of vaporization) into the food as the steam changes back into liquid water. The steam will circulate throughout the cook pot all by itself and heat every part of the food equally.
Second, if you want to boil food, you need to cover the food with hot water. You have to heat ALL the water to boiling temperature, and then keep it boiling for several minutes, and then dump out all that hot water when you’re done. Steaming requires only a few tablespoons of water — basically, just enough water to cover the bottom of the pot.
Since your food is inside a nice, tight plastic bag, the pot stays clean.
Bag Hydrating
Bag-hydrating, the other cooking method, just requires you to add hot water to food in a bag. Experiment with instant mashed potatoes. I add four tablespoons of powdered milk, and four of Parmesan cheese. And maybe some extra seasoning. For a long hike when I’ll need more calories, I’ll also add two to four tablespoons of oil or butter per bag. All of this gets mixed up and packaged at home, in my kitchen, before the hike.
The pre-seasoned bags of instant mashed potatoes are pretty good all by themselves. The milk, cheese, oil, and extra seasonings are my personal preferences. Each pouch of instant mashed potatoes, right off the store shelf, nominally holds enough for four servings, but that seems to be about right for one meal for one hungry person on the trail.
Try it at home first, to see how it works out for you.
Two other foods are couscous and ramen noodles. Minute rice and corn meal dishes need too much heat to bag-hydrate, but bag-steaming will work for them. Depending on what’s available in your area, you may find something like instant bean mixes. These work pretty well either alone or mixed half and half with instant mashed potatoes. Instant refried bean mix. Instant black bean mix.
Hummus is an option and doesn’t need to be cooked, if it suits you.
There are lots of recipe resources available for those who need them. I prefer either minimal cooking of very simple foods, or foods that don’t need cooking, like cheese crackers, corn chips, potato chips, or dry breakfast cereals.
I did hear a rumor third hand of a woman who hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in 2005, who was said to eat only canned cake frosting. I overheard one guy talking to another and the first guy said he’d talked to a third guy who saw inside this woman’s pack one day, and there was no food in there but cans of frosting. Sugar and fat. Calories. That’s really about all you need.
Take your daily vitamins, stay hydrated, and stop in town every week or so to eat your vegetables, and you’ll be OK. But calories come first.
Exercises
- Try steaming some cornmeal muffins at home. If you don’t like cornmeal, then try something else. Just for fun.
- Look through catalogs of outdoor gear. Find a portable oven that works with a backpacking stove. Buy the oven and the stove. Then keep track of how many times you use them, if ever. Write a short story about your experiences, changing your name and location so no one will ever find out you were really that dumb.
- Stand up, go over to the window, and stare up at the sky while you scratch yourself and yawn. Feels good, doesn’t it? You can do this every day while you go backpacking, but you have to go. (Tip for the savvy: leave the window frame at home.)